Wolters Kluwer, Health has announced that the Ministry of Health of Mongolia is now providing healthcare professionals throughout the country of three million people with full access to UpToDate, the clinical decision support resource trusted by more than two million clinicians worldwide. Thousands of rural doctors and healthcare professionals in the world’s most sparsely populated nation are now using the UpToDate app, often without a cellular signal, to quickly find answers to clinical questions across 25 clinical specialties.
With the UpToDate clinical decision support app, Mongolian clinicians from the Gobi Desert to the mountainous north and west, have, in the palms of their hands, a vast medical library of more than 12,000 continuously updated clinical topics in 25 specialties with 9,500 graded recommendations authored by global experts. Clinicians in far-flung regions can download the entire contents of UpToDate onto their mobile device for uninterrupted access to clinical answers—even when no cellular or wifi signal is available for kilometers.
With national access first available in December 2020, clinicians throughout the 1.56 million sq. km country quickly added UpToDate to their most-used resources. In the first three months alone, more than 100,000 clinical questions were answered with UpToDate users exceeding 7,000 in number. As a country with more than a quarter of the population under the age of 14, improving healthcare for children has been a key application of UpToDate. Pediatrics quickly emerged as one of the most used specialties alongside infectious diseases.
At the Mongolian National University of Medical Sciences, UpToDate is playing a role in the formation of Mongolia’s future clinicians with access for 142 faculty members across 23 clinical departments.
In 2017, the Mongolian government, working with the WHO, launched a bold ten-year initiative called the State Policy on Health 2017-2026 which aimed to mainstream universal healthcare and bring medical diagnosis and treatment in the country to international standards. Now, UpToDate is helping Mongolia achieve the program’s objectives by providing clinicians with access to globally trusted medical resources. And by monitoring usage of UpToDate, the Ministry of Health also gains continuous insights on improvements in the quality of care that citizens receive.
Analysts at the market research firm Outsell, Inc. emphasized the significance of UpToDate for driving gains in care at a national level, particularly in unevenly distributed health systems like Mongolia, in their report, It's More Than an App: UpToDate Anywhere Works toward Standardizing Quality of Care. Outsell found “the respected clinical support tool is actually addressing a population health ‘meta-metric’: variability in the quality of healthcare. Access by municipal, regional, or national health ministries or agencies can directly impact and equalize care at a higher level, whether in a hospital, community clinic, or at home through a visiting nurse.”
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